[287] Souvenirs, VII. 187.
CHAPTER XIV
“LA REVANCHE”
1870-1914
“The passion of revenge is habitually over-estimated as a motive, possibly through the influence of the novelists and playwrights to whom it is so useful. When we examine man’s behaviour objectively we find that revenge, however deathless a passion it is vowed to be at emotional moments, is in actual life constantly having to give way to more urgent and more recent needs and feelings. Between nations there is no reason to suppose that it has any more reality as a motive of policy, though it perhaps has slightly more value as a consolatory pose.... In 1870 the former (France) was humiliated with brutal completeness and every element of insult. She talked of revenge, as she could scarcely fail to do, but she soon showed that her grasp on reality was too firm to allow her policy to be moved by that childish passion. Characteristically, it was the victorious aggressor who believed in her longing for revenge, and who at length attacked her again.”—Wilfred Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, 199 (1916).
Mme. Adam’s attitude towards that policy known in France as la Revanche offers an emphatic denial to one of Germany’s numerous misrepresentations as to the origin of the Great War. In their peace conversations with America, as on many other occasions, the Germans have declared that one of the chief causes of the present struggle was the Revancharde Policy of France. Nevertheless, for at least twenty years before the war that policy, which had never been adopted by the French Government, had ceased to be advocated by the majority of the French nation. One of the countless proofs of this may be found in the title Mme. Adam gives to the last volume of her Reminiscences, Après l’Abandon de la Revanche. About the year 1880 she began to find that those who advocated la Revanche were a constantly dwindling minority. This minority continued to diminish until, in the years immediately preceding the Great War, those whose national hopes were focussed on the reconquest of the lost provinces (for the word revanche means not so much “revenge” in our sense of the word as a winning back of one’s own) came to number not more than one per cent. of the whole population. This was that infinitesimal group in whose Chauvinist activities and aspirations the German Empire professed to see a menace to the peace of Europe. And even among those Chauvinist nationalists, of whom Mme. Adam was one of the most fervent, there was hardly one, certainly not Mme. Adam herself, who would have ventured to advocate an immediate aggressive war for the purpose of reconquering Alsace-Lorraine. Not even the leader of French militarists, Boulanger, desired it. Nevertheless, it was true that Mme. Adam and a few fellow idealists desired to see la Revanche becoming once more what it had been during the first decade after 1870, l’idée reine, the governing idea of France.
La Revanche in this academic sense was the banner of the Ligue des Patriotes, presided over by Paul Déroulède, of the Action Française, a Royalist society founded by Alphonse Daudet’s son Léon, in collaboration with that gifted writer Charles Maurras.
But none of these people were practical politicians; and none of them, as we cannot repeat too often, advocated an immediate aggressive war for the reconquest of the lost provinces. They desired above all things that the brethren from whom they had been parted under such heartrending conditions should not feel themselves forgotten. And it was for the sake of these exiles that the revanchards protested against Gambetta’s counsel, pensons y toujours n’en parlons jamais. They spoke of them constantly, they spoke of them loudly—too constantly, and too loudly, perhaps; for they certainly failed to inspire the majority of their compatriots with that consuming desire for reunion which burnt in their own hearts.